The courtship of Sahar Shafia and Angel Ricardo Ruano Sanchez was not quite that whirlwind, but just about.

Within four months of meeting — introduced by older sister Zainab — 17-year-old Sahar was proposing wedlock to her secret boyfriend. Of course, in the Afghan culture from which the siblings emerged, unfamiliarity with prospective grooms was common practice. Their own mother, Tooba Yahya, met her husband, Mohammad Shafia, on the day the engagement was arranged, at the instigation of Shafia’s barren first wife. And Zainab would agree to marry the man her mother advocated after a 24-hour marriage to her preferred choice had been dissolved.

More relevantly — and just like Zainab before her — Sahar was desperate to flee the strict family household. Taking a husband offered the only escape where she might end up not dead. As events tragically unfolded, the teenager was doomed to perish anyway, along with Zainab and their younger sister Geeti and Shafia’s No. 1 wife — if no longer No. 1 in the connubial pecking order — Rona Amir Mohammad.

Ricardo had advised waiting longer but agreed to the union. So the young couple hatched a plan. They would run away to Ricardo’s native Honduras, where his parents still lived. And though the Ruano family wasn’t Muslim, that would not be a problem.

“My parents would have been normal,” Ricardo, 23, insisted on the witness stand here Wednesday, under cross-examination by Tooba’s lawyer, David Crowe, “because our religion as Christians is not as strong as Muslim. It’s a religion that is normal. I know my parents would not have asked her to convert. Why would they?”

Crowe, pouncing on the whiff of Islamophobia: “But yours is normal.”

As if Sahar’s faith, as interpreted by her family, had nothing remotely to do with the horror that ensued — an “honour killing” of four females, the Crown is arguing, allegedly provoked by fury over the victims’ un-Muslim, un-Afghan and unendurable conduct. Shafia, Tooba and their son Hamed have each been charged with four counts of first-degree murder. The bodies of the deceased were discovered June 30, 2009, inside a Nissan that had sunk to the bottom of the Kingston Mills Locks. The prosecution’s theory is that all three defendants participated in a quadruple homicide staged to look like an accident, with the Nissan pushed into the canal by a second family car while en route to Montreal from a motoring vacation in Niagara Falls.

Sahar and her heart’s desire had revealed their elopement scheme to Ricardo’s aunt, Irma Medina. The youth had lived with Medina for a time after arriving in Montreal from Honduras. Sahar felt safe in the woman’s apartment, where she occasionally met her boyfriend after school.

“She told me that if her parents knew about her relationship with Ricardo, she would be a dead woman,” Medina told court. And Medina never doubted the genuineness of Sahar’s fear. “All the time she was talking to me, she was serious. She said if her parents learned about it, they would kill her.”

Despite her dread of that possibility, Sahar persisted with the relationship. “Because she loved Ricardo,” Medina explained, “she told me that. She said she would love him till death.”

That certainly appears to have been the case. Ricardo, however, on the witness stand, was clearly startled by a particular photograph retrieved from Sahar’s cellphone —printed versions found also in Hamed’s suitcase when police executed a search warrant on the family’s home. In one of the photos, taken in early June, Sahar is being embraced by an unidentified young male.

There was so much, though, that Ricardo didn’t know about his Sahar. The girl rarely spoke of her family and the cruelties to which she was subjected. Indeed, Sahar had introduced herself as “Natasha’’ for some mystifying reason and that’s what Ricardo called her for the first three weeks that they dated.

During their four clandestine months together, Ricardo twice noticed bruising on Sahar’s arm. She told him that she’d suffered the bruises in a fall but Ricardo was skeptical. “It didn’t look like a bruise from a fall. It looked like a blow from when someone has hit you.”

The second time, Ricardo questioned Sahar more intently. “Tell me the truth. But she kept saying, no, I fell, I fell.”

Nor did Sahar disclose to Ricardo what apparently had wounded her most deeply — the absence of any mother-love.

As court has heard, Tooba had handed over her third-oldest of seven children to Rona shortly after the baby was born. This also is common practice in polygamous Afghan marriages when one of the wives is unable to bear children. Further, Sahar had expressed sadness to teachers and child welfare workers at being shunned within the family, punished when a younger brother tattled to the parents about having seen her being kissed by a boy. Her siblings had been ordered not to talk to Sahar and this silent treatment had lasted “for a long time.”

The teenager’s anxiety and depression — she admitted to a suicide attempt that had received no sympathy from her mother — prompted a vice-principal to call in a social worker from Batshaw Youth and Family Centres, an agency that deals exclusively with English-speaking children in Montreal.

Evelyn Benayoun was the intake worker who fielded that call. She spoke with the vice-principal, who then handed the phone to Sahar.

“She felt that she was emotionally rejected by her mother,” Benayoun testified Wednesday. “Her mother wasn’t talking to her.”

Sahar said: “I want my mother to speak to me.”

Benayoun was sufficiently alarmed by what she heard — including the vice-principal’s suspicions that Sahar was being physically and mentally abused in the home, by older brother as well as parents — that she flagged the case as “Code 1,” meaning it demanded immediate intervention.

“Sahar told me she wanted to die because she was extremely sad, sad because the home situation was unbearable for her. She was feeling isolated, singled out by her mother, who persistently refused to speak to her, and she couldn’t take it anymore.”

The suicide ideation was especially worrisome. “But when I asked her how she would do it, she didn’t have a plan.”

During the phone conversation, Sahar sounded conflicted about what she wanted authorities to do for her. “She was extremely scared. She told me she wasn’t allowed to share information about the family with outsiders and she knew she was doing that.”

Under cross-examination by Hamed’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, Benayoun agreed that she hadn’t made any notation about physical abuse by the brother in the in-take file turned over to the social worker who later met Sahar face-to-face. Benayoun tried to explain — while being constantly interrupted — that the allegation had originated with the vice-principal who initiated the complaint and she would only have included further remarks if Sahar had denied it.

Observing the nature of a job where Benayoun routinely heard about claims of mistreatment and abuse, McCann asked: “I take it those sorts of things happen every day in your profession?”

Benayoun: “It doesn’t end the way this case ended.”

The Crown will call its final witness Monday.

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